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The Blogosphere As Å™Uvre: Individual and Collective Association for Information Systems AIS Electronic Library (AISeL) European Conference on Information Systems ECIS 2012 Proceedings (ECIS) 5-15-2012 THE BLOGOSPHERE AS ŒUVRE: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE INFLUENCES ON BLOGGERS Hendrik Kalb Technische Universität Berlin Matthias Trier Copenhagen Business School Follow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2012 Recommended Citation Kalb, Hendrik and Trier, Matthias, "THE BLOGOSPHERE AS ŒUVRE: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE INFLUENCES ON BLOGGERS" (2012). ECIS 2012 Proceedings. 110. http://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2012/110 This material is brought to you by the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in ECIS 2012 Proceedings by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE BLOGOSPHERE AS ŒUVRE: INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE INFLUENCES ON BLOGGERS Kalb, Hendrik, Technische Universität Berlin, Franklinstr. 28/29, 10587 Berlin, Germany, [email protected] Trier, Matthias, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, 2000 Frederiksberg/Copenhagen, Denmark, [email protected] Abstract Blogging has often been described as writing an online diary but, nowadays, it is more diverse and a considerable amount of blogs forms a common interconnected resource – the blogosphere – with comprehensive societal impact. While various studies have inquired social-psychological influences on the intention to contribute to an individual blog, the perceptions related to creating such a common valuable good have not yet been focussed. Therefore, we introduce a new construct – the œuvre of blogging – to better account for the notion of the blogosphere as a collective outcome. Furthermore, we propose a research model to inquire the influence of individual and collective beliefs on the œuvre in comparison to short-term blogging activity. We conducted an online survey with 509 international distributed bloggers to test our model. The results of our study provide support for the importance of an œuvre construct to explain influences on bloggers and blogging. Keywords: Blog, Blogosphere, Collective benefit, PLS, Knowledge Sharing. 1 Introduction The blogosphere is a public good that has an increasing societal impact next to traditional media like press or TV. Current prominent examples are the influential blogs in political movements in Egypt (Lynch, 2007) or Iran (Coleman, 2005). But also in other domains, people engage in blogging, e.g. in the fields of arts or science (Wang, Jiang and Ma, 2010). The blogosphere as an institution has two connotations, which have not yet been sufficiently researched and theorized: On the one hand it is considered as a place where people build relationships – the blogosphere as a social networking phenomenon (Ali-Hasan and Adamic, 2007; Tian, 2011). This view is emphasizing the activity of relating to others. On the other hand, it is also important to recognize that the numerous contributions yield a joint creation – the blogosphere as a common œuvre, an institution shared by all bloggers and readers. It can be argued that the increased societal influence of the blogosphere is significantly emanating from the development and quality of this joint result, and it is this œuvre which eventually might become, as an artefact, an important cultural heritage of our Internet era. In related fields, various existing studies on knowledge exchange or social media use have so far mostly focussed on the interaction aspect but ignored to study the role of the emerging artefact (Kankanhalli, Tan and Wei, 2005; Wasko and Faraj, 2005). It is an open question what the contingencies are that drive the importance of the resulting œuvre. For example, with the event of social media, knowledge transfer appears to increasingly prefer the transient sharing activity (‘bringing people together’) and awards reduced priority to advancing a codified documentation. On the other hand, Wikis, which are also a means to accumulate and exchange information and knowledge, are clearly more valued for their resulting artefact than for their discussions and relationships between actors. To address these open questions, our research studies bloggers and their perceptions of the blogging activity and the resulting blogosphere. We contribute by proposing the new construct of œuvre to better differentiate and understand the role of the collective artefact as an institution formed and shaped by the activity and interactivity of millions of blog users. We argue that this notion of long- term versus short-term views is important to understand the sometimes conflicting research results when it comes to explaining knowledge exchange and system participation. Next to the importance of the resulting artefact (versus the everyday processes that bring it about), previous research substantiated the role of differentiating collective versus individual motives to explain participation and use behaviour (Dholakia, Bagozzi and Pearo, 2004). The social drivers of systems usage are especially relevant, as activity in the social media is no individual endeavour but happens in a very salient social context of other relevant users (Dholakia, Bagozzi and Pearo, 2004). To explain this phenomenon, Dholakia et al. (2004) differentiate We-intention from I-intention to emphasize the difference of a collective effort compared to the individual efforts that were assumed, e.g., in the TAM model (Davis, 1989). Based on this differentiation, we propose that the blogger’s emphasis on contributing to an emerging collective œuvre is primarily driven by We-intentions and the respective collective drivers than the actual everyday activity of contributing numerous blogs. Such a differentiation of individual and collective motives may hence explain when bloggers advance from a short-term activity view to a long-term œuvre view. Correspondingly, we theorize five influence factors for the perceived importance of the blogosphere as a collective outcome (œuvre). A clear differentiation of individual and collective drivers is, however, not straight forward. We address this complication by selecting influence factors and sorting them by the (increasing) role of the social aspects implied in them, ranging from individual abilities to perceiving blogging as a beneficial contribution to the blogosphere as a whole. We conducted an international survey in six languages to test the theorized model. The data were analysed with a structural equation model that is based on the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method. In the remainder of this article we first propose a differentiation of an œuvre-oriented long-term and an activity-oriented short term view. We then theorize our model of influence factors on the dependent constructs of both views. Subsequently, we report the method and present the results of the PLS analysis followed by interpretations and conclusions. 2 Theoretical model In the following, we start by discussing the concept of œuvre followed by theorizing the influence factors for bloggers’ perceptions of an emerging collective blogosphere artefact. 2.1 Blogging activity vs. Contributing to an emerging Œuvre Previous research has inquired the intention to contribute in an own blog from several perspectives. Thereby, various factors were examined regarding their influence on the intention to blog (Hsu and Lin, 2008), the intention to share information via blogging (Lu et al., 2010; Lu and Hsiao, 2007), blog usage intention (Wang and Lin, 2011), and the intention to frequently publish blogs (Lu and Hsiao, 2009). Other related studies explained knowledge contributions to a shared knowledge repository (Kankanhalli, Tan and Wei, 2005; Wasko and Faraj, 2005). When reflecting on the conceptualisation of these dependent variables we note that this research primarily recognises the everyday social action of blogging or providing information. However, we propose that this social action of contributing entails a second, currently largely ignored, connotation. Next to the transient activity of posting blogs we need to improve our understanding of the resulting shared artefact, the blogosphere, as a joint œuvre. In analogy to the evolving Wikipedia, it might not alone be the short-term value of the contributive act or comment to other fellow bloggers that drives users, but also the advance of the collective result. To better capture this duality of action and institutionalised artefact we propose to augment the current measurement of contribution activity (e.g. knowledge contribution) by a second, long-term and more societal outcome, the emerging œuvre . In the case of the blogosphere, it is at the same time the networked domain of information and the network of bloggers which may act as a means to ensure authenticity and quality, but which also may emphasize authority and thought-leadership. The œuvre of the blogosphere can hence be regarded as a unique socio-technical artefact. In the absence of some absolute measure for this joint result, in our study, we consider the bloggers’ perception of the œuvre. In explicating the role of the joint outcome, we aim to sharpen and strengthen the current perspective on blogging as an activity that creates a valued public good whereas existing studies on the intention to blog focus on the creation of an individual or personal resource of the blogger. 2.2 Drivers of Blogging Œuvre and Activity We further propose that the short-term activity perspective and the long-term
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